Thursday, April 17, 2008

Academia and Football

Football is one of those things that, like a good piece of art, attracts so much interest that the observer is pressed to suspect there is something more going on than what merely appears to the eye. The overpopulated philosophical subdivision called 'aesthetics' catalogues the attempts of some great minds hoping to reify the unspeakable in art using words, attempts that eventually culminated in Adorno's wry and hilarious 'Aesthetic Theory,' a work crafted with the sort paragraph-less, obfuscatory prose now considered de riguer among humanities professors from UCLA through to the Sorbonne.

Having completely dissected and, ugh, deconstructed the art that for thousands of years many found merely to be a pleasant distraction from the grinding hopelessness of daily life, academics are increasingly turning their gaze toward the 'Beautiful' Game (but what is beauty, really, other than the fascist projection of bourgeois values yada yada yada). No longer a sport featuring twenty-two players and a ball, football provides a lens to study everything from the hyper-masculine hero-image of the modern footballer to the anthropological root of war as spectacle through to the breakdown of the relationship to sign and signified in modern commercial sponsorship (I wonder what Baudrillard, recently dead, would have to say about Sky Sports broadcasting Fly Emirates versus AIG Insurance?). Like Don DeLillo's fictitious Hitler studies in 'White Noise,' football is just one more esoteric peg on the plinko board for academia to hit on its way to the bottom.

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, maybe even a little dim, but what happened to the enjoyment of football for football's sake? I realise that I'm speaking as one who has devoted the last five months to writing about football, but I don't expect the game to unlock the secrets of Muscular Christian oppression or to yield some timeless insight about the dynamics of Marxian class conflict. It seems to me that Western intellectual progress has led itself down the rabbit hole of irrelevance, and football is merely one of several victims as it spasms for air. Perhaps as we hopefully move back to a culture of noble auto-didacts seeking to avoid the credentialed logorrhea of the academic class, this sort of thing will be looked back at as the height of (post?) modern decadence.

In the end it may not matter what academia makes of football, like those countless unread doctoral theses permanently parked in university library stacks across the globe, except that all those minds could be pursuing something better like tackling the massive global inequity wrought by commercial capitalism or countering the machinations of empire pursued by the Bushes and Ahmenidijad's of the world. Meanwhile, why bother putting into words something like Nakamura's strike yesterday in the Old Firm, the magic of Anfield European nights, or the mysteries of the calculation of injury time? Sometimes these things are best left to silence to reconcile.

About AMSL

While this blog started in December 2007 as a mish-mash on everything from North American Football Fans (NAFFs) to the history of soccer in Toronto, it has recently morphed into a football blog about football blogs, and soccer media in general, with a focus on North America and Canada in particular. It was included in the middle of the Guardian's (arbitrary) list of 100 football blogs to look for in 2011, after James Dart clearly ran out of ideas.

"It turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, from wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swapping judgments like Lords of the Earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid life." J. B. Priestley

About

Richard Whittall writes on football from his hovel in Toronto, Canada. In addition to this site, he also writes the Canadian Soccer history blog, The Spirit of Forsyth. He is a regular contributor the Score's Footy Blog, Canadian Soccer News, and Brian Phillip's unsurpassed Run of Play. His writing has appeared in Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail, and he was a contributor for Brooks Peck's Yahoo! blog Dirty Tackle for the 2010 World Cup. He appeared once on Football Weekly as villasupportgroup.